OHB SE (formerly OHB Technology AG)

OHB SE is a German space technology group headquartered in Bremen, founded in 1981 and formerly known as OHB Technology AG. It reported €1.25 billion in FY2025 revenue (up 21% year over year) with adjusted EBITDA of €126 million, employed 3,466 people, and entered 2026 with a record order backlog of €3.35 billion. The company is one of only three European Space Agency satellite prime contractors, alongside Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space.

Business Overview

OHB's portfolio is almost entirely concentrated in spacecraft hardware, giving it a category purity of near 100% — rare in an industry where most primes dilute space revenue across aircraft, missiles or defense-electronics lines. Its flagship programs include the Galileo navigation constellation (more than 22 satellites built), the MTG third-generation meteorological satellites for EUMETSAT, Germany's SAR-Lupe and Georg radar reconnaissance satellites, and ESA's Hera planetary-defense probe, for which OHB is prime contractor. In 2026 the company won its largest single contract ever — a €250 million award through its Swedish subsidiary to build 20 EPS-Sterna weather satellites — pushing the backlog to a record €3.35 billion and providing roughly 2.7 years of revenue visibility.

The manufacturing footprint is deliberately mid-scale and high-autonomy: large cleanroom satellite assembly halls and thermal-vacuum test centers in Bremen and Munich (Germany), plus subsidiary facilities in Sweden and Italy. As prime contractor, OHB takes end-to-end responsibility for design, structural and mechanism fabrication, subsystem integration, environmental testing and in-orbit qualification of multi-ton geostationary satellites and deep-space probes — a genuine hardware-manufacturing capability rather than a brand-operated assembly model.

Growth Drivers

European institutional space spending is the company's primary tailwind. Galileo second-generation satellites, Copernicus follow-on Earth-observation programs, and new German national-security space architectures (including the Georg reconnaissance series) provide a stable multi-year production pipeline. The EPS-Sterna meteorological constellation win diversifies away from navigation and Earth observation into a fast-growing operational weather-data segment that EUMETSAT is funding aggressively.

Deep-space credibility is a second growth axis: the Hera planetary-defense mission, which flew toward the Didymos asteroid system in 2025, demonstrated OHB's ability to act as prime for complex interplanetary spacecraft. As ESA and national agencies shift budgets toward lunar infrastructure, asteroid exploration and space situational awareness, OHB's demonstrated deep-space systems capability is expected to translate into follow-on primes and payload roles in the late 2020s.

Challenges & Outlook

The defining overhang is capital structure. Global private-equity firm KKR, acting with the Fuchs founding family, launched a premium voluntary public takeover; by late 2024 the concert party held 92.02% of voting rights, and free float collapsed below 6%. Market participants widely expect a delisting or full privatization, a transition that could reduce public disclosure and complicate talent retention even as it removes short-term shareholder pressure.

Demand risk is structural rather than cyclical: OHB's traditional GEO communications-satellite market has been eroded by LEO megaconstellations and cost-disruptive US competition, and the company's institutional dependence concentrates risk in European budget cycles. With roughly one-tenth of Thales Alenia Space's revenue, OHB lacks the scale to win the largest LEO constellation-manufacturing contracts. The five-year outlook hinges on converting its record backlog into a higher-margin production cadence, winning Galileo second-generation volume, and proving that Germany's space champion can hold prime positions in ESA's next wave of deep-space and Earth-observation missions.

Based on revenue scale, manufacturing depth and European strategic role, OHB SE achieves a VerityRank Score of 78/100.